MovieScore Media: The Hundred Year Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared [2014] - Matti Bye

Co-inciding with the German theatrical release of the film on March 20, 2014, MovieScore Media will digitally release the globetrotting, award-nominated score from The Hundred Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared, a film adaptation of Jonas Jonasson’s bestseller of the same name. Co-written and directed by Felix Herngren, the film can be best described as Scandinavia’s answer to Forrest Gump. The story is about Allan Karlson, the titular 100 year old who escapes from an old folks’ home and gets mixed up with some drug money, all the while recalling his rich life filled with coincidental historical meetings with people like Harry Truman, Robert Oppenheimer or Ronald Reagan. Starring Robert Gustafsson in all incarnations of Allan, the film offers a varied tapestry of 20th century history and has a score to match the adventures spanning several decades. The music was nominated for the Swedish Film Academy Award, the Guldbagge.

The music is courtesy of Matti Bye, a Swedish film composer who is most famous for his incomparable style of improvisation on the piano, a skill he heavily relied on while writing new scores for such early Swedish silent classics as Phantom Carriage by Victor Sjöström, Häxan by Benjamin Christensen and the Gösta Berling Saga by Mauritz Stiller. His recent credits include Everlasting Moments by Academy Award nominee Jan Troell and Stig Björkman’s Scenes from a Playhouse which is a documentary about Ingmar Bergman.

The score for Hundraåringen som klev ut genom fönstret och försvann offers an exciting kaleidoscope of various genres and styles. Although the piano is still dominant (”Intro”), the score covers several different eras of the last century from the Russian-sounding ”Red Square” through the Gershwin-esque ”Manhattan” and the Bond-flavored ”Espionage” to the macabre ”Funeral March.” If you’re looking for an underscore that transports you through an entire century in one sitting, Matti Bye’s work will not disappoint!